Priestess Of The Moon

by Ray Cummings

What lay in the mysterious “blank space” near Lake Champlain? What horrible invisible thing was it that came out of it to steal so many lovely girls away, fighting against—nothing!


An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes

CHAPTER I


THE first of the weird, mysterious abductions of young girls occurred on the evening of June 10th, 1992, in the outskirts of a small village in upper New York, near Lake Champlain.
There were two eye-witnesses—a young couple seated on a rocky ledge some fifty feet above the country road. It was a warm evening, brilliant with moonlight that drenched the somnolent countryside. The lovers saw a young girl coming alone along the road. She was, at the moment, the only thing moving in the drowsy scene, and idly the young couple watched her.
Suddenly she stopped, stood staring. Then her scream floated up through the moonlight. A scream of terror!
From the overhead rock she was plainly visible, alone there on the road; and now she was struggling. Her body twitched; her feet kicked; her arms flailed at the empty air. Weird sight! Then she was leaning backward, as though something were pulling at her.
The young couple on the rock were for that instant stricken numb. The fighting girl’s scream had died away, as though something abruptly had muffled it. The next instant her body rose into the air, horizontally hanging at a height of two or three feet.
Then, still with arms and legs wildly flailing, she lurched off the road and crashed into a thicket of the adjacent woods. The breaking underbrush for a few seconds was audible; then there was silence.


THAT WAS the first incident. The girl’s name was Rosa Smith, daughter of a village shopkeeper. The young couple on the rock rushed down, reported what they had seen to the local authorities. Incredible story! The village police could only smile skeptically. But Rosa Smith was gone.
The affair was kept secret. What the young couple had described was unbelievable, but it suggested things too weird for the public news outlets. Especially since by midnight of that very day it was discovered that another girl from the same village—Granton, New York—was missing. And by then government Shadow Squad men were on their way to Granton, so that the whole case was officially submerged from public knowledge.
I was on night duty in New York City, that evening of June 10th. My name is Alan Kent, newsgatherer and sometime newscaster on the local government air outlets. The reports from Granton came out on the teletype ribbon at my desk, about midnight, all with the official government “silence stamp” upon them.
These strange disappearances, with their weird implications of mystery and horror, sent a shudder through me. For I had a personal interest in that village of Granton. So had young George Merlin, whose desk was next to mine, here in the night-desk room of the Anglo-American Broadcasting Company.
I called to him, and he came and silently stared over my shoulder as the news rolled out.
“Why,” he gasped, “that’s up there in Granton! Anne is there this summer, in a girls’ vacation-group only a few miles from Granton!”


I KNEW little Anne Johnson well.
Young Merlin was engaged to her. He stared at me now, his face white. He was only a year younger than I; both of us were in our mid-twenties. We had always been especially good friends, perhaps because we are so different.
I am tall, an inch or so over six feet, blond, and, my friends say, somewhat lazy. At least, I like to take things easy and am ordinarily placid of disposition. Merlin was the reverse. Short, slim, dynamic; dark-haired, with a handsome swarthy face from his Latin-American mother.
An impulsive, hot-headed young fellow, George Merlin. If he likes you, there could not be a better, more loyal friend. But for an enemy—I wouldn’t want him.
“I wonder if she’s all right,” he muttered.
“We’d have had reports, if she wasn’t,” I tried to reassure him.
But would we? I recalled Anne Johnson’s sweet face, her trim little figure. Was she, too, a victim of this weird, ghastly thing, whatever it might be?
But my own shudder was for more than that: Gloria Clayton. Gloria was Anne’s cousin. Like Anne, she was an orphan. She lived with her grandfather, a retired scientist—Professor Robert Clayton, a brilliant man in his day.
I was not exactly engaged to Gloria, but I loved her. If I hadn’t known it, I certainly did now. She and her grandfather lived in their little summer cottage, in the hills only a mile or so from Granton.
Professor Clayton had a laboratory there, where he puttered around with the chemical and physical research problems which were his only interest.
Merlin was reaching for our split-wave A.B.C. audiphone.
“What’re you going to do?” I demanded.
“Call Anne.”
But the girls’ camp didn’t answer! Just the dead signal!
Merlin’s hand was shaking as I took the instrument from him. Would Professor Clayton answer? And then suddenly Merlin’s breath sucked in.
“Alan—look!”
There it was! We stared, numbed, at the teletype ribbon:


Granton, N. Y. More weird abductions… Blair vacation-group for girls, on Lake Seneca, scene of new mystery. Director Blair found dead. Mrs. Eliza Blair unconscious, condition grave. Girls missing: Mona Abington, fifteen; Elsie Earle, fifteen; Anne Johnson, sixteen…


Merlin’s horrified oath sounded as he jumped to his feet.
Anne too!” he gasped. “There it is—see it—Anne too! What—what are we going to do, Alan?”
“Take it easy,” I muttered. “She may still be found.”
I grabbed the audiphone again. I guess I was as frightened as Merlin, though perhaps I didn’t show it. Before I could put in my call, the public-wave instrument at the other end of my desk was buzzing. I jumped for it.
“You—Alan?” It was Gloria Clayton’s soft contralto voice. I had never been so glad to hear anything in my life as that voice. A torrent of relief swept me.
“You’re all right, Gloria? I was just going to call you.”
“Yes, Alan. Grandfather wants to speak to you.”
We had no visible connection. Professor Clayton’s voice was urgent, apprehensive.
“I’ve had the news, Alan. Police official called me. I want you to fly up at once. Will you?”
“Yes, of course,” I agreed.
“Something more than queer about this,” the professor went on.


MERLIN was clutching at me. “Does he know about Anne? You’re flying up there—so am I!”
Something more than queer? It was all of that. We called our substitutes to our desks, and within a few minutes we were in my little single-seater Wasp, flying northward. I was at the controls. Merlin, grim now and tense, sat beside me, transcribing from our official radio-receiver the incessant code-casts.
Most of them concerned this midnight affair at Granton. There were apparently no survivors of the affair at the little Blair Camp for Girls. Only five young girls there, Anne Johnson among them, and all had vanished.
Director Blair was dead—there were no further details of how he had been killed. Mrs. Blair was in a hospital; a brain concussion. She might or might not live to tell what she knew—if she knew anything.
We listened numbly. There seemed no more news. Seven young girls, stolen within a few hours, all in this same neighborhood! Wild reports were coming in, of course, of other attacks; other weird things which people claimed they had seen or heard. But none of them seemed authentic. Public hysteria was understandable.
The night was still clear with just a few fleecy clouds high up, brilliant stars and moonlight. We clung fairly low, swept past Albany. In another twenty minutes we were approaching our destination.
By government prohibition you can keep a thing off the world’s news channels in this year of 1992; but these tragic happenings couldn’t be hushed locally, of course. Roller-cars cluttered the roads. Posses scoured the little patches of woods. There had evidently been a cluster of local planes. But red traffic flares were warning them down now.
We got through with our official signal. The town of Granton certainly looked wide awake. Lights were on in every house, people milled in the streets. Professor Clayton’s home was back in the hills: an unusually lonely spot, made more so by the forty or fifty acres of his wooded grounds. He had a small private landing field for which we were heading.
“Alan, listen to this.”
Merlin had momentarily switched to a public open newscast, from the local station near this point. It was a warning that no surface traffic, or pedestrians were to approach the north end of Lake Seneca. Aircars too were ordered to keep away. Something was there. Something unknown. A “blank spot,” the newscaster said.
“Now what the devil does that mean?” Merlin demanded.
We stared at each other. This weird thing a “blank spot”? That could only suggest something of the unknown. Something—gruesome?
Ahead to the west over the moonlit countryside, we could see the lower end of Lake Seneca, where a few houses were clustered. The despoiled Blair Camp was a mile from the lower end, on the west side. We flew over it, high up.
The buildings were intact; lights of the prowling, still-investigating police and Shadow Squad were visible. Merlin’s face was tense, flushed now with baffled rage as he gazed down to where little Anne Johnson had been, and now was gone.


THE lake threaded its way, a narrow gleaming ribbon in the moonlight, stretching up between the wild ragged hills. Merlin gripped me.
“You’re going further up?”
“Damn sure am. A blank spot? Let’s take a look!” I told him.
We weren’t challenged by the men down there at the Blair Camp. Soon it was behind us, with Lake Seneca like a silver river winding ahead. Then within a minute we could see where the lake broadened at its north end. There was hardly a house up here, just rocky hills and forests in the little valleys. Could this be where the abducted girls had so mysteriously been taken. A blank spot—
“There’s a plane off there,” Merlin said suddenly.
We could see it far to the north: an official Shadow Squad plane, by its lights. It was circling, evidently keeping well away from the lake end. And then in another moment it headed north and was gone.
We were at an altitude now of perhaps a thousand feet. And then we saw the blank spot I
How shall I describe it? There was something down there near the west end of the lake. The terrain there was open, a level place with only a few trees. And something was there!
A blank spot… You couldn’t describe it any better. The moonlight shone clearly on it. A place where for fifty or a hundred feet there seemed a weird patch of—nothingness! The moonlit rocks were gone. The stunted trees that should have been there—weren’t.
Weirdly gruesome, that blank spot. Was it some monstrous Thing crouching there? A Thing of which you were aware only because you couldn’t see it? Wild thoughts flooded me…
“Alan, you going to take us over it?” Merlin was gripping my arm. His face was stamped with terror—the terror that the bravest man must feel when he is confronted with the unknown.
I had no time to answer him. The drone of our atomic motor suddenly sounded queer, lowering in pitch, straining. The dial indicator showed that the motor revolutions were slackening, as though suddenly our little Wasp was straining to shove its way forward! Our speed was slackening, slackening…
“Alan—good Lord—” Merlin’s gasp was flung away as our aircar lurched wildly, went completely out of control. The moonlit ground and the heavens were a swirling chaos as we rolled over and spun like a thing stricken.
That was a horrible few moments. By some miracle I finally steadied the ship, with the heavens again overhead and the ground underneath. And then I saw that we hadn’t fallen. The moonlit terrain and the ribbon of lake now were far down!
We had been at an altitude of a thousand feet. We were twice that now! Mounting, being flung upward like a stricken bug, shoved away from that weird, monstrous Thing down below!



CHAPTER II

Fighting the Unknown


AT three thousand feet we seemed to have passed beyond the influence of the weird Thing down there on the moonlit lake shore. The blank spot was some distance behind us now. I banked, circled.
Then we saw two police planes coming from the south. Evidently they, like ourselves, were determined to investigate. Doubtless they had not seen what had happened to us.
“By the stars,” Merlin muttered, “they better keep away!”
We had no chance to warn them. They were approaching far to the south. Well below our altitude now, they were perhaps no more than five hundred feet above the lake. Flying almost side by side, they swept directly over the monstrous invisible thing.
A ghastly, silent drama. We held our breaths. There was nothing to be seen save the two swift-flying planes, with the moonlight glistening on their alumite upper-wing surfaces. And suddenly one of them wavered!
Nothing came up from the ground to hit it; certainly nothing that we could see. But in that second it was turning end over end and zooming! As though blown by a titanic jet of air, it came hurtling up. Evidently the strange force, whatever it was, had hit it more directly than we had been struck.
The police plane came hurtling up with gathering speed. One thousand, two, three thousand it zoomed. The rush of air pressure broke first one of its wings, then the other.
At four thousand feet it seemed for a moment as though freed from the strange clutch. It poised an instant—and then fell, with flames breaking out until, at the end, it was a long thin finger of fire, hurtling down into a wooded hillside miles away.


THE OTHER police plane got past. It seemed trying to rise and escape, but it too was struck. An amazing thing happened. A thousand feet aloft and half a mile north of the lake, it seemed, suddenly to drift backward! Like a dragonfly, still flying forward, but into a wind that was carrying it toward the ground.
I must have muttered a word picture of what my eyes told me. Merlin gasped.
“But we felt no wind! It wasn’t air pressure—”
But it was an invisible gripping force. For a few seconds it dragged that second plane backward. The pilot miraculously kept it level, but only for those few seconds. Then his craft turned end over end as it was drawn backward and downward—drawn toward the blank spot!
The deadly force must have been released abruptly at the end. For the stricken, crumpled, flaming plane lurched sideward and then fell by gravity—fell like a lurid live coal, to be quenched in another few seconds as it plunged into the lake.
I swung our plane away. Certainly we had lost our desire to investigate further. Within a few minutes we were back over Granton.
“Good Lord,” Merlin was muttering. “This damned Thing—what is it?”
There was no answer to that. White and shaken, we sat silent and grim. Merlin was thinking of Anne Johnson, of course. Anne, with six other young girls, in the grip of—what? And Gloria? I was in a panic now to get to her.


PROFESSOR CLAYTON’S home was a rambling, one-story dwelling, set on a hillside in a grove of trees, with a small flower garden around it. The moonlight glistened on its terraced roof. Tubelight to welcome us glowed at the front door. Two of the side windows were shafted with yellow light from inside. A peaceful midnight scene, surely. No tragedy could have struck here.


“WE landed silently with our motor cut on the small stage in the landing field a hundred yards or so from the house. Merlin and I climbed out. We were unarmed.
I thought of that now for the first time as together we descended the landing incline and reached the ground. The house was hidden here by an edge of the hill. There was nothing in sight except the angle of ragged slope and a path through the trees, leading down and around the hill to the house.
“Keep your eyes open,” I muttered. “Let’s stay close together, George.”
My tone startled Merlin. He gazed at me wide-eyed.
“Good heavens, Alan, you don’t think—”
“I don’t know what to think—” I told him truthfully.
We started slowly down the path, flinging glances around us. Surely I have no desire to give the impression that we were a couple of cowards. I don’t believe I’m exactly afraid of anything—human. Certainly Merlin is like a little wildcat when anybody makes him mad and tackles him.
But was this Thing—human? The gruesome feeling was on us that it wasn’t. A Thing you couldn’t see, or hear, but only sense. Every moonlit copse, here by the trail, suddenly seemed masking something of gruesome, supernatural terror. Something that was lurking by the wayside, eyeing us, watchful, baleful, ready to spring at any moment.
“All clear,” Merlin half whispered in a tone that gave the lie to his words. “Nothing here, Alan.”
“No. Guess not,” I muttered dubiously.
The squat outlines of the Clayton home came into view, half masked by the intervening trees. The two oval windows of the living room were like great yellow eyes staring at us.
There was nothing out here in the placid moonlight. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Nothing…
Then both of us felt it! A little tug! An invisible something tugging at us, gently trying to pull us sideward off the path!
“My God, Alan—”
We both lurched, gripping each other. Then we stood with feet planted, leaning backward.
A ghastly force! But nothing was touching us. There was nothing to feel save the sideward pull; so that we faced it, leaning backward, tugging against it.
Inexorable force! Steadily it was growing stronger. Merlin lurched, with one of his feet slipping on the sandy ground. My grip saved him from plunging off the path.
“Alan—that smell—”
I too could smell it now, coming on the night breeze gently toward us. An acrid, choking smell. Electrical? The smell of a heated electrode?
Certainly no more than ten seconds had passed while we stood there, struggling in the grip of that intangible adversary. Then I seemed to hear something.
“George—listen—something is coming at us!”


I HAD no more than time to gasp out the words. Something seemed to scrape on the rocks nearby. The slow, dragging tread of—footsteps? Then my braced feet slid on the path, and Merlin went with me, as though a hurricane that we couldn’t feel was blowing us forward. Scrambling, fighting, we slid ten or fifteen feet. We were separated now; and suddenly I struck something solid.
An adversary at last! The force itself was gone. Staggering, I gripped something altogether tangible. It writhed in my grip, a thing with panting breath. But there was nothing to see as I wildly fought with it.
Nothing? A blank spot was here in the moonlight; a squat upright emptiness in the air, like a solid, ponderable hole of darkness which was wrapping itself around me!
For that chaotic second everything was a blur. I recall seeing Merlin rolling on the ground, with arms and legs kicking as he fought with a writhing adversary. Ghastly vision! There was a second when Merlin seemed leprous: his head blotted away, and one of his legs gone. Then he lunged and came into view again.
I too was on the ground now; pressed down, engulfed. And then something struck my head. The whole world burst into a blinding glare of light, with a torrential roar in my ears. Then swiftly my senses faded and I was swept off into the abyss of unconsciousness.


“ALAN—ALAN—you’re all right now?”
I opened my eyes to find George Merlin bending over me. Blood was on his pallid face from a ragged cut. His shirt was torn, smeared with blood and dirt. Only a minute or two had passed. Like myself, Merlin had been knocked unconscious. And our adversaries had fled, doubtless thinking us both dead…
“Yes—guess so—all right now,” I murmured.
The moonlit rocks were swaying as I climbed dizzily to my feet. I was bathed in cold sweat, but my strength returned swiftly.
“Who’s out there? Who are you?”
Professor Clayton’s voice came at us from the nearby house. He stood there in the doorway, silhouetted by the interior light, with Gloria behind him. Gloria was safe! A rush of thankfulness swept me.
We staggered into the house and told them what had happened. Professor Clayton’s thin face went white. He was a man of nearly seventy now; thin, frail, with lined features surmounted by a mass of shaggy white hair.
“Around here?” he exclaimed. “Those damnable things around here? Why—why I thought they were supposed to be up at the head of the lake.”
“Well, they were here, all right,” Merlin declared a little brusquely. “Gone now. I hope,” he muttered.
But had they gone? I sat with my arm around Gloria. Never had she seemed so dear, or looked so beautiful. She was just turned seventeen. Tall, willowy, with long ash-blond hair, braided now and coiled on her head. She was clad in a white house blouse, with long sleek trousers edged with black.
“Haven’t you any weapons?” I demanded. “We were fools, coming up here unarmed.”


GLORIA went and got them—two little short-range flash-guns. It was comforting to have them around.
“The Shadow Squad men were here,” Gloria said. “They left a little while ago. There didn’t seem to be any danger to us in this neighborhood.
Oh Alan, you’ve heard about Anne Johnson? Poor little Anne—”
I nodded. Then I audiphoned to Granton, reporting what had happened to Merlin and me. They responded that men would be sent here presently, but there was so much turmoil, they couldn’t be everywhere at once.
“Well, I guess we’re safer here than trying to go anywhere else,” I said to Professor Clayton.
Besieged here, embattled. We all had the same feeling. But with the house locked and the windows and doors barred, we felt better. Lightning seldom strikes twice in the same place. The gruesome things had been here, and Merlin and I had frightened them away.
They had come for Gloria. None of us said that, but we were all thinking it, of course. But Gloria was only one young girl of hundreds. No reason for the invisible monsters to come back. Or was there? The inexplicable mystery had us all gripped in the cold clutches of its hideous embrace…
“What I wanted to tell you,” Professor Clayton was saying, “is that there are things about this affair which are queerly reminiscent.”
Reasons why this house should be attacked, more than any other house? Why Gloria perhaps had been singled out as a victim?
I sat numbed, silent and tense as old Professor Clayton told us his story. Twenty-five years ago he had been experimenting, trying to find the secret of gravitational force, he began.
“I thought then that I could give the secret of space-flying to the world,” he continued in his slow, earnest voice. “It will come soon, Alan. Perhaps it has come already!”
Space-flying! A new era. In this year of 1992, science was on the verge of that great achievement, of course.
But as far as was known, it had not yet been accomplished. Yet a quarter of a century before, Professor Clayton had thought that he had the secret. Experimenting with iridiumite gas bombarded by electrons in a vacuum tube, he had been able to set up a magnetic attractive force. And by a reversal of current, the force was a repulsion.
“You see,” he told us, “gravity plates in a space ship could be made like that. And tonight in this weird visitation, there have been manifestations of just that force.”
There had indeed! Our little Wasp, which had been hurled upward. That police plane, similarly booted about; and the other plane, drawn down. That strange force had seized Merlin and me, out there on the path a few minutes ago. Yes, we seemed to understand the weird menace now. Electro-magnetism; artificial gravity, clutching us, pulling at us!
“I had a fellow working with me,” Professor Clayton went on. “All this was before you were born, Gloria. He—his name was James Diller. My assistant. He—well, he insulted your mother, Gloria. I thrashed him, beat him pretty severely. And then he disappeared. We wanted to have him arrested, but he was gone.”
This fellow Diller had taken money and jewels with him—and Professor Clayton’s scientific formulas. A spaceship perhaps could have been built with those formulas. Professor Clayton soon after had been taken ill with a long serious illness. Never since had he been able to obtain the same results from his experiments.


“YOU mean, that fellow Diller—” I began.
“He was a genius,” old Clayton explained. “A scientific genius. But he was malign, perverted…
“Well, there was something else on which I was working with him—the secret of mechanical, electronic invisibility. Our experiments resulted in a light-absorbing fabric.
“Now I realize that if Diller was able subsequently to create a magnetic field, to bend light-rays from the background around an intervening object—that would be almost true invisibility. In that case, one might sometimes be aware of a blank spot—”
A blank spot! The weird puzzle was suddenly all of one piece!
Gloria asked suddenly, “George, what’s that in your hand?”
Merlin had been fumbling idly in his jacket pocket. His fingers came out now with a little gray, circular object.
“Got it in the fight,” he said. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
He was holding a small, circular gray disk, with a broken string of bluish vegetable fiber fastened to it. Evidently Merlin had snatched it from his unseen antagonist, back there on the path when we were attacked.
I heard Gloria suck in her breath with a little gasp as we all stared at it.
“Let me see that,” Professor Clayton said sharply.
I bent over him as he examined it. The thin flat disk was some three inches in diameter. A medal? It was of gray, porous, weird-looking rock, carved with an insignia in bas-relief—a thin, horned crescent, with a little star beside it.
Old Professor Clayton’s fingers were trembling as he held the disk.
“That porous rock,” he exclaimed, “I know what it is! A meteorite fell some few years ago, near here. It was composed of rock exactly like that specimen. Selenite, Alan! It has the same spectroscopic bands as the rock-surface of the moon!”
Professor Clayton’s voice shook with his emotions.
“I understand it now. These abductors are Lunites! This is a religious symbol! A fanatic Moon cult, desiring our young girls, plotted their abduction!”
His quavering old voice died away. And suddenly in the silence Gloria gasped,
“Why—Oh, dear God—that means me! I’ll be kidnaped too!”
I gripped her. “Gloria! What in the world makes you think such a thing?”
I got no further. A low, horrified oath from Merlin checked me. He seemed trying to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. His eyes were wide with horror.
We followed his gaze. On the center table a few feet from us, our two small flash-guns were lying. The tube-light bracket cast its sheen down upon them. And—they were moving now! Like things suddenly alive, they slid off the table, poised for a second in midair—and then turned their muzzles toward us!



CHAPTER III

World of the Moon


FOR that ghastly second we were all four stricken into numbed horror. I had a vague idea that I could see where the guns, poised in the air with their level muzzles hanging over us, were scale-like at the handles.
Something invisible was gripping them! A blank spot, here in the Clayton living room! Then I saw other blurred things slowly close in on us—vague upright blurs of darkness through which the walls of the room showed unreal.
It was no more than a second or two, that stricken tableau. We had all four staggered to our feet. Merlin looked as though he were about to leap.
“Careful!” I warned. “Easy there, George—they’ve got us!”
But Merlin’s tensed muscles made him jump forward. And then the thing hit us! Flash-guns do not fire. We were struck instead by their repulsive force. Imponderable waves of nothingness, that repellant gravitational thrust!
Merlin’s body was checked in his leap as though he had struck a wire net, slowing him, stopping him and then hurling him back. I had flung my arm around Gloria. We slid backward together, struck the wall, and were pinned upright.
Beside us there was a thud, and then another. Merlin, pinned here; and the crashing body of poor old Professor Clayton. I turned my head to stare at him. He had tumbled backward, lost his footing. The back of his skull had struck the wall.
He was dead as he hung there. A gory, ghastly, crucified figure, he was pinned flat against the wall, with buckling knees and his shaggy white head dangling forward horribly.
Gloria’s anguished scream mingled with Merlin’s curses. I tried to move, but could only lunge an inch or two with the monstrous force thrusting me back. The poised guns had lowered now. We heard a chuckle, the throaty chuckle of a man’s voice confronting us. Then there was a click.
An amazing materialization! The blank blob was yielding a shimmering form; a ghost solidifying, taking on color until in another instant the leader of our weird adversaries stood before us.
A stalwart figure, this lethal enemy, a man as tall as myself. He tossed back his black-fabric hood; flung aside his black robe.
He was a young fellow of about my own age, fantastically garbed in a blue animal-skin jacket with tails that flared at the waist. His dark, electronized cloak partly covered the jacket, but revealed the black trousers and boots beneath.
I stared into the grinning, evil face. The features were definitely weird. The face of a Lunite? It was heavy-jowled, hawk-nosed, with dark eyes deep-set under heavy black brows. His was the face of a commanding Earthman. But his skin was unpleasantly blue-gray, puffed at the neck like a pouter pigeon’s.
Surely this was not the face of a man born on Earth! He stood for an instant leering at us, materialized when he had clicked off his robe-current.
Now four other figures were visible in the room. Dark-cloaked and hooded they were, with boots and gloves. Ghoulish beings, all of them. Squat, lumpy, with massive shoulders and bulging chest and back.
One tossed off his hood, revealing a round bloated head, almost hairless; a blue-gray face, with goggling, bleary eyes; a wide, high-bridged nose, the receding chin merging with a puffed pouter-pigeon neck. And a mouth like a blue slit—a mouth with a thin, bluish tongue licking out as the creature’s dark, gleaming gaze roved over Gloria.
“Well,” I heard myself gasping, “what the devil—”


DANGLING ornaments on a bare, blue-gray arm tinkled as the fellow raised it to silence me. And now I saw that on his chest one of the gray rock disks was hanging. This one was larger: a full six inches or more, emblazoned with the same insignia—the horned crescent with a star beside it. I felt Gloria trembling in my arm as she too stared at it.
“What is it your name?” our captor asked abruptly.
English! His voice was guttural, queerly intoned; but the words were carefully, correctly pronounced.
“What’s yours?” Merlin as brusquely demanded. “Look here, damn you, you’ve killed that old man! You let me loose just once and I’ll—”
“Take it easy,” I muttered nervously.
The big fellow facing us laughed.
“So there is still fight in the little one? I, Targg, am intrigued.”
The dignity of command was in his voice and his gesture. Again his gleaming dark eyes were on me.
“You are called—”
“Alan Kent,” I snapped.
My name seemed to mean nothing to him. One of the ghoulish figures was now plucking at him, murmuring something in a guttural, unknown tongue. Targg’s gaze went to Gloria. I tensed. If I could get loose—to do what? A fight here—and Gloria, Merlin and I would be killed in short shrift.
“Her name—it is what?” Targg suddenly said.
“Gloria Clayton,” she murmured tremulously.
That certainly seemed to mean something! Targg’s thin, bluish lips curved with a faint, triumphant smile. From the robed, unworldly figures there seemed to come a mutter of triumph.
“So?” Targg sneered at me. “That is Clayton? That old man? This is his house?”
“Yes,” I agreed, rather sharply, resenting his tone.
George Merlin got irate too.
“Now you look here—” he began.
He was stopped by a sudden withdrawal of the gravitational repulsion that pinned us against the wall. One of the robed figures, at a gesture from Targg, had clicked a mechanism under his cloak.
We were suddenly released. The pinned body of Professor Clayton sagged, thudded forlornly to the floor.
In my arms Gloria was limp, shuddering. Merlin slumped down, gathered himself for a spring.
Targg hardly moved, save for another gesture with his eyes and a flick of his hand. Three of the cowled figures engulfed the raging Merlin. I noticed that the solid, squat Lunites moved sluggishly, as with an effort, undoubtedly because of the gravity here, so much greater than on the moon.
Heavily they slumped on Merlin, gripping him. Targg had dangling weapons at his belt, but he made no move to touch them. He watched me a moment and then his gaze fixed calculatingly on Gloria.
A moment later I saw one of the Lunites with our flash-gun, jabbing it at Merlin.
“Stop that!” I said sharply. “You, Targg, stop him—you cracked us on the head before. Once is enough!”
“So quite,” Targg said with misplaced grammar.
At Targg’s command the Lunite desisted. Merlin went limp, and they dragged him to his feet.


I HAD shoved Gloria partly behind me.
“Now what—” I began.
“You are the friends of this old man Clayton?” Targg was crisp. “You have known him long?”
“That’s right,” I snapped.
“We do not kill you then. We shall take you—with this girl. The Great Saar will be pleased to have you.”
It was the best I could hope for. Certainly it was futile to fight. And I noticed now that there was at least a suggestion of respect for Gloria in the attitude of these weird invaders. The hideous, lumpy Lunite men seemed to be gazing at her with awe—an awe intensified by Targg’s mention of the Great Saar, whatever that could mean.
A Lunite ruler? Were we to be taken to the moon?
Abduction into space! Quite evidently that was Targg’s intention. Haste was upon him now. I tried to stall with questions. We had sent for the Shadow Squad men; they should be here from Granton almost any minute. And then what?
If they came, they would lunge in upon us, with an exchange of shots which could so easily kill Gloria. Contemplation of such a thing made me as eager as anyone to get out of there.
We left Professor Clayton lying on the living room floor. I tried to keep Gloria from seeing him. I could only be thankful that Targg would let me keep Gloria beside me. He seemed to offer no objection when, with our captors close around us, we were hurried from the house. The back door was fused, its lock melted by Targg’s heat-torch.
It was only a mile or so, across country here, to that north end of Lake Seneca, where the blank spot had been. I realized now that opaque area had been the encampment of the abductors. The neighborhood, as we were silently taken away, seemed to have quieted down.
Clouds obscured the sky now; the moon and stars were gone. A mixture of emotions possessed me: desire to escape with Gloria and Merlin—and thankfulness that it was dark, so that we would not be seen and attacked, with so great a chance that Gloria might be killed by well-meaning rescuers.
I was tense, watchful for any possibility of escaping. Quite obviously that was futile. I had done my best to convince Targg that I was docile, since it was essential that I know his purpose.
I hinted that by helping him, I might like to share with whatever benefit my perfidy might avail me. He grinned at that; and I knew that my conciliatory efforts had not fooled him in the least.
The lake road was empty, dark. I had a chance to whisper to Merlin:
“Don’t be a damned fool now! Take it easy.”
“All right, I’m trying to,” he said.
“We’ll watch our chance, whenever it comes.”


BUT it didn’t come. Presently the blur of the Lunite camp loomed ahead of us. From some mechanism in Targg’s hand, a little signal sprang—a tiny puff of light that mounted twenty feet or so over us and died in a second.
Instantly the blur of emptiness directly in advance of us was gone! *


* In 1992, while the secret of invisibility had apparently escaped the scientists of Earth, Lunites, according to Author Cummings, were able to make use of it for both offensive and defensive purposes.
In the case of the Lunite encampment near Granton, no true invisibility was obtained. There was probably a barrage of light-absorbing electronic vibrations, but no enveloping magnetic field was possible. Only a “blank spot”—an area of weird emptiness—was to be seen.
Obviously this “blank spot” could only have emanated in some way from the malign genius of Professor Clayton’s ousted assistant, James Diller. An object—a man standing in the center of a room, let us say—is garbed so that no light-rays are reflected from him. His specially treated garments absorb every vestige of color, so that he is then not so invisible as an empty outline, because the background, the wall of the room behind him, is blotted out and the outline then appears.
Albert Einstein has demonstrated that by natural law, a magnetic field surrounding a solid body bends the light-rays which come from behind it. James Diller quite obviously discovered how to create that magnetic field. (Orentz demonstrated the principle fully in Baltimore in 1939.)
Thus, enveloped by a magnetic field, our man standing in the enter of the room no longer quite blots out the wall behind him. Light-rays from it are bent around him. The observer in front sees the background of wall, and thus is not aware of the intervening object.
The Diller application of this scientific phenomenon in Professor Clayton’s living room was undoubtedly less perfect than it might have been. As Targg confronted Alan Kent, the background was blurred, distorted, so that Kent was aware of his presence in between.—Ed.


It was hardly an encampment. A few dark figures were visible now, dim outlines on the rocks. And close beside the lake shore there was a round, globular object. It stood some thirty feet high. A faint sheen of weird violet light streamed from its lower doorway, where an incline led down the ten feet to the ground.
The figures surrounded us. There were about twenty of them. Squat, bulging Lunites, the same as those with us; save that they had no garments of invisibility. Jabbering in their strange tongue, they plucked at us and then at Gloria, until Merlin and I growled at them, and Targg gruffly ordered them away.
The need for haste was on everyone now. Off to the south, over the dark landscape back toward Granton, I could see the moving lights of roller-cars on one of the roads. Armed men were on the way, perhaps to attack the mysterious invaders.
Overhead, high up and westward, the lights of a police plane showed. But with the experience those other planes had had, including ours, this one was keeping well away.
With Targg and his weapons prodding us, we were thrust up the incline and into the doorway of the globular space vessel.
“You go up,” he said shortly.
The muzzle of one of our own little flash-guns jabbed menacingly into my ribs. Then Targg gripped Merlin and me by the shoulders.
“You make some trouble,” he warned, “then it will be bad for you—and for this girl Gloria Clayton.”
“All right,” Merlin agreed sourly.
“There will be no trouble,” I said.
A dimly blue-lit circular incline wound like a screw spiral up the center diameter of the globe. With Merlin and me still clinging to Gloria, we were thrust up it. Rooms opened at a higher, mid-section level. From one of them, where the door-slide was closed, the muffled voices of girls sounded.
Targg checked us. “The girl goes in here,” he said.
“The devil!” Merlin began. “She—”
Gloria had clutched at me with a little terrified cry.
“Oh, Alan—”
“She is too frightened,” I protested. “See here, Targg, you let her stay with us.”
That was a tense moment; and then Targg shrugged. “So quite. I shall not mind that.” He eyed Gloria with his evil leer. “She shall see that Targg is a clever fellow—a fellow who has plans which no doubt the Great Saar will approve. You will like me when you know me better, little Gloria.”
His look and his words turned me cold. We mounted to the top of the globe, where it opened into a small circular room, banked with controls. Over it was a transparent dome, through which the clouds overhead were visible.
In a moment more we rose from the earth, gathering speed as we hurtled up through the stratosphere and out into interplanetary space.


SPACE FLIGHT. There is no need now, as I write this in 2001, for me to detail that voyage of 1992 in the primitive Diller vehicle. It was six days and nights, by Earth-time, as we headed for the moon. To Merlin and me, that first trip from Earth was a thrilling, awe-inspiring experience. Many of you who read this perhaps already made such a trip. Certainly you have read about it in a myriad of details.
But to Merlin and me, the experience was dulled by our apprehension. Much of our time was spent with Targg in the control room, or in small cubbies assigned to us just under it. The girls, captive in the room below, we did not see.
Targg, with his suave, ironic manner, parried all our questions concerning them, save to tell us that they were not injured. Was little Anne Johnson one of them? There were seven or eight down there, but who they were we did not know.
There was one woman in this part of the space globe. A Lunite woman—a “breeder,” Targg contemptuously called her. Evidently she was caring for the imprisoned girls; and she ministered to Gloria. Her name was Tara. Loving Targg—assigning herself to him, as he explained to us—she had taken a name notably similar to his own.
A strange, almost pathetic creature, this Lunite girl-breeder. In age she could have been fifteen, or thirty. Short and squat, she was, shapeless with puffing gray-blue flesh. Bluish-white hair fell in a tousled mass almost to her waist to frame her puffed, broad-nosed face.
By Earth standards it was a hideous female face. Yet there was a sullen pathos to it. A breeder. Object only of faint contempt, so that from infancy she had doubtless been sullen, with smouldering resentment, perhaps only half defined in her mind, against her natural lot in life.
She was clad in a round nondescript garment, tied tight over her breast and falling almost to her bare feet. She spoke a little English. Her kindliness with Gloria Clayton made Gloria say once:
“I like you, Tara. Are all your women gentle, like you?”
“Gentle?”
Her goggling dark eyes stared at Gloria’s beauty. Then her slow gaze swung to the nearby Targg and back again.
“Gentle? Oh, but yes, thank you.”
She twitched away from Gloria’s hand and was gone. Somehow the incident made me shudder, as though with a premonition of danger.
Then at last we were dropping down upon the surface of the moon. Upon Earth, moonlight can shine so gently as to make romantic the words of lovers. It was night here now. But the reality of the lunar night is cold beyond human conception: cold and darkly silent.
Awed, Merlin and I stared down at the mirror-grids here in the control room, which reflected the bleak, grim surface beneath us.
“Listen,” Merlin protested to Targg, as indeed he had a hundred times before. “Where do you Lunites live? There is no air here. Say—you’re not exactly a Lunite, anyway. Who are you? What are you bringing these girls here for? Who is this Great Saar you’re always talking about?”
But Targg would only smile his ironic smile.
“You shall see. And the little Gloria, she is the one, of course. More beautiful than I could have imagined. And I have my plans—you will see that Targg is clever.”


THE familiar Moon surface. I had seen it so often through telescopes; now it was a close reality beneath us. A bleak, fantastic landscape of gray porous rock, inky black in the shadows, the surface of the moon, white on the rock-tops.
Here was the cauldron of the Mare Imbrium, with the giant Archimedes towering near it, an enormous circular crater with perpendicular sides. Then presently we were dropping into it! Solid blackness closed around us, as slowly now we descended.
How far down we went is something which Earth scientists have yet to calculate. Certainly I do not know. Down to the Moon surface, we went, and then below it. Ten thousand feet further down, undoubtedly; perhaps more. It was as though we were a tiny descending elevator, slowly, carefully dropping.
A vague light-sheen was visible outside now—an iridescence, which seemed to stream from out of the rocks themselves.
I could not help but marvel at this honeycombed little world. We were dropping close beside an almost vertical crater wall, and presently it was broken with grottoes, caverns and gullies that opened into it. They were all softly, weirdly illumined by the iridescence of the rocks: ramified passages, connecting one with the other by interlacing tunnels.
Suddenly Merlin gripped me as we went past one shining level.
“People! Look there—”
A vertical city! There were four or five levels which slowly we dropped past. Humans moved in them. The passages were like little streets in which people moved; and we saw small habitations which were cut in the rocks to the sides. Lunites, all of them: men, breeders and little lumps of children, who came rushing to the brink of each of the street levels to watch us as we slowly went by.
It was like a village, rather than a city. Four or five levels passed, and then again there was only glowing iridescent emptiness. Here was a miniature world underground. Air was down here now, of course; air too heavy, too immobile to rise up to the lunar surface so far above. Air, and warmth. Here, then, was a subterranean world, invisible to our Earth telescopes, unknown to us throughout the ages!
The caverns constantly were widening. We could see open, shining distance back in some of them now: a subterranean countryside. There was soil, blue-black, distant open fields, where figures were toiling. The crater wall presently had receded, or we had dropped past the ceiling of some immense cavern, so that now the shining glow was open all around us. Shimmering and iridescent, this underground world.
Then we stopped our descent. Targg, with a tense triumph upon him now, stayed with us in the control room. We heard the lower door opening; the frightened gasps of the girls below as they were dragged out.


VOICES were outside now in the shining glow: a babble of voices. They floated in a confused murmur up the globe incline from the lower door, which now was open. And suddenly I realized this was the vast murmur of thousands of voices, like a great shout going up from an assembled multitude of people.
“Come,” Targg said. “This girl goes with me to the Great Saar. Have no fear, she will not be harmed.” He chuckled with a grim humor. “Quite the reverse.”
He led Gloria down. Merlin and I, grim and tense, crowded after him, with half a dozen of our Lunite captors pressing close upon us.
“You too shall watch the choosing and the ceremony,” Targg added. “It will be this girl, of course. She is to become our Priestess. And then the Great Saar will talk with you.”
Priestess of the Moon! The choosing and the ceremony! A great shout from thousands of voices rolled up as we appeared in the globe’s doorway. For a moment Merlin and I were choked by the strange heavy air, half blinded by the iridescent light. And then we stood numbed by the weird, fantastic, tumultuous scene which lay spread before us!


CHAPTER IV

Blood on the Moon


IT was a huge natural amphitheater—an irregularly circular chamber, here in the midst of what seemed to be a crowded city, stretching off into its many-colored upper breaches. Terraced rock ledges in a great semicircle were jammed with people.
Fantastic was this gathered throng of Lunites: the men the breeders and their children, seated there on the curved, terraced rows. At our appearance their guttural voices rose in a reverberating wave. Colored fabrics like flags were waving.
Our eyes beheld a veritable riot of weird color, bathed in the strange opalescent sheen. And from the sides, beams of light were springing: puffs of light that mounted like colored fire, making lurid for a moment or two the vast arched cavern ceiling which shimmered high overhead.
“It surprises you,” Targg was chuckling.
He stood close ahead of us, holding Gloria. The riot of color painted her pallid face. Her expression was queer, her eyes wide as she stared breathless at the weird scene.
“Come, my dear,” Targg said. “This is for you—your night of triumph.”
Merlin and I made an effort to follow, but our Lunite guards crowded around us, menacing us with their guns and their little glittering stiletto-knives. There was a brief scuffle, but we yielded, let ourselves be led a few hundred yards to one side, where from a small rocky ledge we could look out and down upon the tumultuous scene below.
“That must.be the Great Saar,” Merlin murmured. “The ruler here.”
The Great Saar sat on a huge rocky dais, with his dignitaries around him, facing the gigantic semicircular throng. A great glory of prismatic light bathed him in the huge silvered, padded chair which he favored as a throne. An old man, the Great Saar, with a great, puffed, goggling head that wobbled on his puffed, flabby, gray-blue neck.
A head-dress of vivid colors hung from his forehead, to merge with the splashing color of his ornamented robe. On his chest there was a huge flat disk, flaming red, emblazoned with a glowing crescent and star.
I touched Merlin. “There are the other girls. See—there’s Anne.”
Mutely he nodded as he sucked in his breath, staring. The seven little Earth-girls had appeared now, brought forward by their captors. Terrified, white-faced, they were yet holding themselves bravely as they were led forward to face the Great Saar.
A Lunite official ranged them in a line on a raised ledge to one side of the pompous little ruler. The effulgence of light bathed them. I saw little Anne, slim and petite in her white blouse and dark trousers—
And now I saw something else, something puzzling. I murmured it to Merlin and silently we stared. To one side, partly behind the ledge where the row of Earth-girls were on display, there was a little open space with a cluster of rocks.
A group of figures were there, ten or a dozen men. Lunites? They were partly in shadow, we could not see them clearly. But they seemed taller, straighter, huskier. Some of them were garbed in the fantastic, flaring Lunite colored jackets and gaudy puffed pantaloons—the holiday attire here.
But others were raggedly clothed in shirts and trousers. Bullet-headed fellows. Earthmen? Set apart from the huge Lunite gathering, they seemed to be roistering among themselves. Drinking some form of alcoholite, perhaps; for they seemed to be raising cups to their lips at intervals, nudging each other as they stared at the beauty of the little Earth-girls so close before them.


A VAGUE stab of apprehension surged through me. And I saw too that some of the Lunites, on the seats nearby, were flinging glances of distrust at these bullet-headed specimens. Hatred, perhaps… and fear…
“Queer, George,” I muttered to Merlin “They look like Earthmen What could they be doing here?”
But Merlin was only staring with numb, helpless terror at little Anne Johnson.
And then we saw Targg up there on the dais with Gloria. He led her past the Great Saar. The watching throng was silent now with awed expectancy, as Targg and Gloria knelt with foreheads to the ground. Then Gloria was put with the girls, and Targg vanished.
Spellbound, we watched. A sort of music from some hidden source was now drenching the tense, vivid scene: strange, unseen instruments, barbaric rhythms. It welled up into a great surge of sound, with the throng now swaying silently to it with rapt faces, as though gripped by its spell.
Religious music? It seemed so. Like, an exhortation, it had swollen into a great hymn of triumph.
“So? You are interested, I see?” Targg was suddenly again with us. He sat down nonchalantly beside me and I gripped his arm.
“See here, Targg, what’s all this about? Choosing a Priestess, and you say it will be Gloria? Why should it?”
His gaze turned and met mine. For once he was not ironically smiling, and his deep-set dark eyes smouldered with his inner emotion.
“There is no reason why I should not tell you,” he said slowly. “Your little friend Merlin here asked me who I am. Did you ever hear of an Earthman by the name of James Diller?”
I sucked in my breath. “Yes. Sure I did. A long time ago.”
“Before your time, doubtless, and mine,” Targg said. “He was a great Earthman, that James Diller. A great scientist, the greatest Earth has ever produced. He died here only a little while ago. He was my father.”
Strange details Targg now proceeded to unfold. He was a half-breed, his mother one of the Lunite breeders here. James Diller, a fugitive twenty-five years ago on Earth, had gathered fifty or more criminals about him.
In some hidden lair—equipped with lavish funds which their banditry had provided—Diller had built his little space-flying globe, and had perfected the Clayton theories of invisibility. He and his men had wildly thought then that they might at will raid the Earth—perhaps dominate it.
But then, pressed by Earth’s crime-trackers, they had decided to embark into space. They had landed here on the moon with the space-globe crashing. With Targg grown to manhood to help his father, only recently had the space-shuttling globe been repaired.
I gestured. “And those are your father’s men over there now?”
Targg grinned. “What is left of them, yes. They are middle-aged men now—but still they have their ideas. It must be deprivation indeed, when one can remember the beauty of Earth-women. My father told me—”
“And so you came to Earth for some of our girls,” I interrupted him.
“Ah, but that was the motive only of those men you see over there.” His gesture was deprecating, but his smile widened. “Naturally when the Great Saar ordered the trip, our Earthmen here were pleased. So I promised to bring them girls. They are disappointed now that there are not more—”
“The Great Saar ordered the trip?” I cut in breathlessly.


THE paean of music still was surging over the tensed amphitheater. Up on the dais the Great Saar now was standing, a trembling old man, with his arms upraised as though in exhortation of mute appeal to the Great Moon Spirit to guide this excited assemblage.
“Yes, he ordered the trip,” Targg answered.
It was all made clear. The Moon Ruler, obviously near the end of his natural life, had had a vision: a vision of a Moon Priestess, the living incarnation of the Great Moon Spirit. There had been none for generations, and the Great Saar had prayed that knowledge would be given him to select one.
And the vision had come. A strange vision, because it told him that the Priestess was living, but not on the moon. Not on the moon, but somewhere else in the Great Universe.
The Great Saar had been able clearly to see a strange, fantastic dwelling on this strange other-world and a group of houses. He had seen a ribbon of water, shining white. A young girl, of form and beauty such as none the Great Saar had ever conceived, a girl queerly garbed, had been uppermost in that vision. On her face had seemed to glow all the traditions of the Great Moon Spirit, the longings and hopes of the Moon-people…
Targg momentarily stopped speaking. The music now had died. An expectant hush settled on the watching throng—a hush so great that in itself it sounded loud as thunder. And suddenly in the silence, one of the roistering Earthmen chuckled with ribald laughter, as he stood and pointed at Gloria.
A brief laugh, but it was startlingly clear in the silence. A mutter of resentment rose from the nearby Lunites. For an instant it seemed that some of them would jump up, but others held them back.
On the dais, the first of the girls now was led forward, to stand close before the Great Saar and be inspected. Rosa Smith—it could have been she. Confused, terrified, she stood forlornly while the old ruler raised his hands over her, with his voice intoning into the silence.
Beside me, Targg was chuckling. “He will ask each girl for the response: the ritual of the Great Moon Spirit. She who is our Priestess, and she only, of course, will know the inspirational response.”
Was that Priestess to be Gloria? I recalled her strange murmured words, her queer look on several occasions… But why, of all the earth to choose from, had Targg and his abductors come to Granton? To Professor Clayton’s—to Gloria?
I murmured my thoughts to Targg.
“The vision had many aspects,” he said. “And the Great Saar told them to my father. And my father recognized that particular place on Earth. The vision mentioned an old man with the Priestess. My father could tell that was Professor Clayton. And just as my father was dying but a short time ago, he told me how to find the place.”
Had that been James Diller’s animosity toward Professor Clayton, prompting him to send these abductors to the home of his old enemy, to seize Gloria? Was it that? Or was it something more? Something of the great unknown, far beyond the understanding of mortals…
“I have told the Great Saar it must of course be Gloria Clayton,” Targg was saying. “He thinks so too, but the ritual now will make him quite sure. And when she is chosen—”


TARGG sucked in his breath, and his voice grew intense.
“She is very beautiful, Alan Kent. She will rule here—with me.”
He had been staring out across the riot of color at Gloria, as she stood bathed in the prismatic beams on the dais. But now he turned to me, and the old mocking smile was on his face.
“I do not mind telling you, Kent—today is my great day. Oh, I have it all planned! A clever fellow is Targg, don’t you think? Our Priestess will be acclaimed by the people. And then—”
His lean gray hand slid to his belt. A knife was there.
“A little thrust with that, Kent. The Great Saar will be dead. But who cares? The people have a new ruler—their Priestess. But at best, she is only a girl. And so Targg will rule with her. You see? She and I will—”
His ironic voice suddenly died. He gasped, clutched my arm.
“My God, Kent, look there!”
And Merlin, sitting beside us, gasped out an oath.
For that terrible second we all three sat stricken. The thing was over in an instant, before there was anything that even Targg could try to do.
Rosa Smith was trying to respond to the ritual of gestures and incantations from the Great Saar. And then she was thrust aside, and another of the girls brought forward. Little Anne Johnson, this time.
But our sudden terror was none of that. Behind the line of girls a figure was creeping—a bent, puffed female figure with dangling hair. It was the Lunite breeder, Tara, who had been on the globe. And loving Targg, at last her smouldering hatred for this beautiful Earth-girl had blazed into a consuming fire. A naked knife blade glinted in her hand as she furtively moved toward Gloria.
Targg and I together leaped to our feet. My voice with a wild scream of warning rang out over the silence. Tara leaped, with her knife stabbing.
But she was too late! One of the guards saw her. With a huge ten-foot pounce, he landed upon her. A knobbed metal bludgeon in his hand crashed down. With skull smashed into a noisome mass, Tara wilted down into a quivering, inert heap. And then the guards picked up her body and flung it away…
Targg had vanished again from beside us. The ceremony went on, with the barbaric rhythm of the music soft now in the distance. Incense smudges began burning, an aromatic fragrance that wafted toward us. The smell of it made my head reel a little at first.
The prismatic lights now were intensifying, so bright on the dais that the silent, watching throng on the circular terraced tiers seemed almost in shadow. One by one the girls were rejected as Moon Priestess.
Merlin clutched me. “Where is Anne? What became of Anne? Alan, listen, can’t we get away from here?” he asked desperately.
There certainly seemed no chance, with our alert guards so close. The rejected girls were being held at the side of the dais. In the shadows there, it seemed that the roistering, half-drunken Earthmen were pressing forward. One of them lurched too far, trying to clutch at the nearest girl.
The guards whirled on him and his fellows pulled him back. A few Lunites had leaped from the nearest seats. There was a momentary scuffle, the makings of a riot. But it was over in a moment. Over? To me it was like a little spark, barely quenched before it could ignite a vast explosion…


CHAPTER V

Hour of Trial


NOW Gloria was left standing alone, and a great reverberating murmur rose from the throng as she was led before the Great Saar.
Priestess of the Moon! It was as though everyone in this multitude now suddenly knew that here was their Priestess, so that they made as if to cheer.
Then they were silent, awed, watching the Great Saar as his trembling arms went up and his quavering old voice rose, to mingle with the throbbing music.
Fascinated, numbed, stricken of every thought save Gloria, I stared breathless. Never had she seemed so beautiful. Straight and slim, she was, in her corded black-and-white trousers and white blouse. The prismatic light drenched her with its riot of color, concentrating now into a beam upon her.
It sparkled in the coiled braids of her pale-gold hair on her head. It bathed her, glowing on her so that suddenly, to me as well as to all the vast throng, she was transfigured into something momentarily more than human.
A goddess! The look of a goddess shone from her; radiated from her like an aura. Head erect, tense, with her arms at her sides, she was staring as though in a trance. Suddenly she was exalted. Her face was transfigured—the face of a veritable Madonna!
This was the ritual of the Great Moon Spirit. The throng was murmuring now, low murmurs of triumph and of awe; murmurs rising louder because everyone could see that the quest was ended.
Gloria was on her knees now; then up again, with a slow barbaric swaying of her hips to the faint music. As though to answer her the weird harmonies welled into a great torrent of sound.
The Priestess of the moon, dancing now! Then she was standing to face the obeisance of her people, with her arms upraised as she went suddenly stiff, rigid as a beautiful statue.
Suddenly my attention was drawn to another little scuffle at the edge of the dais. But no one noticed it in the crowd. No one over there cared now, as all stared at Gloria.
One of the drunken Earthmen had seized Anne Johnson; picked her up in his arms, and with a great twenty-foot leap, unimpeded by the moon’s slight gravity, had hurtled his fellows, landed on his feet and run.
Then I saw him again, bolting seemingly for the space-globe, which stood off to one side a few hundred yards away from me.
It brought me to my senses. Beside me, my two guards were now staring, rapt and absorbed as everyone else in Gloria Clayton. That villain carrying Anne—
I turned to Merlin. A figure lay prone on the ground just behind me! Our third guard, with his own knife buried in his heart! And Merlin was gone!
And then suddenly, over by the side of the dais, there was a commotion which could not be ignored. Like an electric spark plunged into a train of powder, it spread.
Several of the drunken men were fighting over girls they had seized. Lunites and the guards jumped at them. A towering, burly Earthman, stronger than any Lunite, scattered the Moon-men. His knife flashed viciously.
One of the Lunites fell, and the drunken renegade lifted the body up, hurled it thirty feet, where it went crashing into the seated Lunites.


A SIGNAL! Targg’s prearranged signal, because of course he had planned all this.
I whirled suddenly. The guard nearest me had forgotten me completely. My fist felled him. My fist squished noisomely into his soft-boned, puffy face. He went down, splattering.
The other guard, suddenly aware of me, tried to raise his weapon. I lunged at him, knocked him backward and fell on him bodily. His skull hit a rock, smashed; and I staggered to my feet.
The scuffle at the dais had widened now. Over all the throng there was sudden wild panic. Lunites jumped to their feet, some trying to run away, some fighting forward. In an instant it was a wildly milling throng, fighting itself. Women screamed and rushing, frenzied people trampled each other.
I dashed from the little ledge, down a rocky path. If I could get to the dais, fight my way through the crowd that now was surging in front of me, then I could reach Gloria.
I could see her up there, crumpled now, with the spell upon her broken so that she was only a huddled, terrified little Earthgirl.
Desperately I scattered a group of Lunites who came milling at me. And then suddenly, breathless after a great leap, I stopped. The dais was only a hundred feet ahead of me now. Up there the trembling old ruler was trying to shout orders over the chaos.
Then I saw Targg behind him, crafty, murderous half-breed that he was. With bared knife he leaped. The Great Saar went down!
And then Targg had jumped for Gloria. Picking her up, he bounded in great leaps diagonally across the open space between the dais and the circular seats. He headed back, partly toward me; headed for the space-globe. I whirled to try and cut him off.
Blood on the moon! The tumultuous scene was abruptly plunged into a new horror. As I fought my way toward the space globe, a beam of light-fire leaped from it, spreading blue and yellow flame.
Desperately I sprang sideward with all my strength, so that I sailed upward in a low arc, with outstretched arms to balance me. The fire-beam went past, barely missing me!
Then I realized that it had not been aimed particularly at me, this thinning, fan-shaped electro-light that seemed to ignite the air through which it darted.
Blood on the moon! Within a moment the turmoil of the great amphitheater was blighted into a ghastly carnage. Garments of the milling people took fire. Screams rose from stricken Lunites, trying in agonized frenzy to leap into the air as their clothing flamed. A frenzied group, these creatures, milling about, trampling their burning fellows.
This was Targg’s plan at the full fruition of its murderous horror. He would get away in the space globe now, with as many of the girls and those of his men who were able to reach it. But first he would spread death and terror here in the midst of this little city.
Then later he would come back, mated with the Priestess of the moon, forcing her to his will, so that she would exhort her awed people to accept him.
I approached the space globe, running, leaping, scrambling, with my mind tumultuous as the scene itself, so that I had no plan save to get to Gloria. The spreading beam of darting, quivering with smoke now: a huge, rolling, yellow-fire was over me and to the side.
The great amphitheater was turgid green cloud. It masked the flaming, wilting human forms, a malodorous smoke-cloud, nauseous with the smell of burning flesh.


THE flame-beam was spraying from a port up at the globe’s control room. Suddenly, inexplicably, it was extinguished. And then outside on the rocks, near the globe’s open door, I saw Targg with Gloria.
She hung limp, half fainting against him; and he stood for that moment, turning into view, with an ironic, triumphant leer at the carnage he had caused. He did not see me as I rose in the air, hurtling toward him.
Everything was so swift and so chaotic—a myriad little things of desperate frenzy, transpiring here in these crowded seconds. In the midst of my sailing leap, I was aware of George Merlin and one of the half-drunken Earthmen, as they fought in the space-globe’s doorway. Little Anne was crouched there with one hand clutching at her breast and the other flung to her mouth in her terror…
I struck Targg with the impact of a catapulted rock; gripped him as we went backward and rolled.
“You!” he gasped. “Well, the end of you now—”
His lean gray fingers clutched at my throat. The frenzy upon me blurred red my vision of Targg’s weird, leering face as it pressed down upon me.
With a wild lunge I heaved him upward, broke his hold upon my throat. And then I was back on him like a pouncing, snarling puma. I pounded his head on the rocky ground; lifted him, smashed him down again until his skull broke.
Panting, I staggered to my feet. Merlin was shouting.
“Alan! Alan! Come on, hurry—”
Faithful George Merlin, with an arm around Anne, was in the globe doorway. Out of a nearby swirl of the nauseous, turgid smoke, a crowd of milling Lunites surged forward.
Frenzied, shouting, hideous, these little men, unable to distinguish who or what was victor here screamed and threatened as they plunged for the space-globe from which the murderous flaming death had spewed at them.
“Alan! Good God—” Merlin cried. “Look out for them—”
Almost a single leap carried me to where Gloria lay on the rocks. I seized her, jumped with her for the doorway.
“Inside!” Merlin gasped. “I’ll bar the door—you work the controls.”
He slid the door, bolted it as in another second the raging Lunites plunged against it.
“Gloria! You’re all right?”
“Yes! Oh, yes, Alan! Oh—what happened—”
Mercifully, to Gloria, it had been like a confused dream, back there on the dais. A numbness caused by her terror? Or had it been really something more than that?
A transfiguration? But it had passed now.
The four of us mounted to the control turret. Another of the bandit Earthmen—he who had wielded the fire-spray through the porthole—lay here, weltering in his own blood beside his wrecked apparatus, where Merlin had stabbed him.
I shoved at the controls. I knew how to work them; I had watched Targg, in the flight from Earth. The little space-globe quivered. Hundreds of the frenzied Lunites were raging outside now.
The globe quivered, slowly rose! With my arm around Gloria, I stood at one of the ports. The great malodorous yellow-green cloud of smoke was drifting away.


AMPHITHEATER of the dead! A thousand or more ghastly, charred figures lying strewn about… Women with little children hugged close to them, their clothes almost burned away, their puffed bodies fused into a noisome mass of charred flesh…
Here and there a pitiful, leprous form still alive, trying to crawl… Little winnowing spirals of flame, where other things once human were still burning… Tiny pyres of horror…
I held Gloria’s face against me so that she might not see. Beside us Merlin was holding Anne. The terrible scene dropped away as slowly we rose into the shining darkness.


THERE SEEMS little for me to add. Nine years have passed since those weird, chaotic events which I have tried to set down here as simply and as vividly as I could. Gloria and I are married now. Our little son is four years old, cast as we would have him in the image of us both.
The Diller space-globe, as you doubtless remember, I wrecked hopelessly when we landed back on Earth, so that we four barely escaped with our lives.
But as you also of course know, there have been recently many short, tentative space flights near Earth, in the newly developed flyers. And an expedition—starting only last week—is now determined to reach the moon.
Perhaps it is there now. Will it be received in friendly fashion as its leaders hope? Or will it be assailed by the outraged Lunites? Surely there can be none more interested in such an eventuality than Gloria and myself…
My life with Gloria has been happy beyond my fondest dreams. But though I seldom speak of it, that scene of Gloria on the dais is always in my mind. She remembers little of it fortunately.
But she has confessed that all her life, since she was a child, the moon at night, riding our heavens, has always fascinated her: arousing strange nameless thoughts, nameless longings—
Just a coincidence, of course. Her seeming response to the Great Saar’s ritual—that was just coincidence, so that the old ruler and the awed multitude, by wishful thinking, persuaded themselves that they had found their goddess.
But—was it only that?
I am writing this now near dawn. It has been a sultry, hot summer night. In mid-evening Gloria and I were seated in our garden; and the full moon rose. A blood-red moon, for a time, with the earth’s hot atmosphere staining the vision of it crimson, where it hung low on the horizon.
And Gloria stared at it so queerly. Thinking—what?
I said nothing. And then suddenly she murmured,
“No! No—my duty lies here with you, Alan. With you—and with our little son—”
I held her in my arms; kissed her gently. There was nothing to say.
The End.

Notes and proofing history
Scanned by cape1736 with preliminary proofing by A\NN/A
June 19th, 2008—v1.0—12,741 words
from the original source: Amazing Stories, December 1940.
This story has never been reprinted as far as we know.